One Four Challenge – December Week 4…

I have joined a month-long photo post-processing challenge called One Four Challenge, hosted by Robyn at Captivate Me. “This challenge is about processing １ image in 4 different ways over 4 weeks.” Every Monday Robyn posts a new version of her photo and challenges us to do the same each week.

This is the fourth and last week of the December challenge…

I was inspired last weekend while watching Sin City (both Sin City and Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For), and as I watched, it occurred to me that all of my photo versions this month have been leading to this noir look.

I realized that if I combined all three of the previous week’s techniques (grungy, black & white, blue period) and added maybe a couple more ideas that I just might be able to get this Sin City look. So I experimented and this is what I came up with…

What do you think? I think it’s pretty cool! As a nature photographer I don’t have many images that I could do this to, I don’t take pictures of people, and rarely take photos of buildings, so I was very pleased that I was able to apply this look, that I think is really neat, to one of my images. 🙂

This week is the last week of the December challenge, so we were asked to not only show all of our versions, but the original too. I am also adding a poll, because I’m curious which one you all liked most. 🙂 I’m finding it hard to choose, I like them all but for different reasons… but the best part of this challenge is that I learned so much this month, not only from my own research and experimentation but from watching the other participants change their images throughout the month. This was a fun challenge. January’s challenge starts back up on Jan 5th… I think I’m going to have to find another image and participate again!

How-To

To create my Sin City Inspired look, I started with my grungy image (week 1)… as a side note, for some reason I didn’t save this as a psd image so I had to work from my final jpg image… over all it worked out… but I did have to work around the vignette…

Next I followed some of the ideas in this tutorial for making the photo have a more Sin City noir look. First, I took my background layer and desaturated it…

Then I copied over the contrast group from my black and white image (week 2)…

I ended up having to redo the painting of the mask because for some reason it didn’t line up quite right (also I had to work around that vignette)… so I reset the masks and painted them again…

Next (following that other tutorial again) I created a levels layer and played around with the black and white sliders until I got the look I wanted…

Then I took the knowledge I learned from my blue period (week 3) and painted the stuffed elephant red…

my final image had these layers…

Well that’s it! I hope you enjoyed my December variations and the accompanying tutorials. Will you join us next month?

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14 thoughts on “One Four Challenge – December Week 4…”

I sat out this month because I knew I would be swamped with work and the holidays. So I missed your original 3 posts on this image. Still, I think I prefer this week’s Sin City version. I am a big fan of the original artwork in the graphic novel and loved the look of that first movie. Haven’t seen the second., but I think your version here would definitely fit in to that world. Great job! See you January 5.

Hello Nic, finally made it – its been a busy fun week at my place.
Love what you did this week and really like that you were inspired by a certain look too.
Hard to decide between the 4, but I too love the classic BW. Its timeless 😄 4 won my vote in the end.
So glad you’ve enjoyed yourself this month Nic!
Happy New Year 😀

Love what you did with week 4 and as a plus it has red for Christmas, whether you like that or not I don’t know but I do 🙂 It’s been fascinating following along as you explained how you got each week as I am still grappling with masks in Photoshop. It was a tough call as I also liked the B&W. Looking forward to seeing what you do in Jan.

Thanks for the feedback, Ben. I really like the techniques I learned that week too. I can manipulate where the viewer’s eye goes with more control with mask layers (the ability to undo just a little or a lot) than you get from the burn/dodge tool.